Green’s story notes that after Maine voters elected Lewiston native Paul LePage, a Republican of French Canadian heritage, as governor in November, some called Garcelon Maine’s first Franco American governor.

While Gov. LePage’s Roman Catholic family came to Maine from French-speaking Canada, Green says, the Garcelon family’s French connections are much less distinct.

The Garcelon ancestors fled France for England in the early 1700s during the persecution of the Huguenots (French Protestants). In fact, Alonzo Garcelon’s great-great-grandfather Pierre was an Episcopal priest on Guersey island, long a British dependency in the English Channel, in the mid-1700s. His son James emigrated to America in 1752, settling in Lewiston in 1776 after fleeing Falmouth the night before it was burned by the British.